Amazon Polly Features

Amazon Polly provides an API that enables you to quickly integrate speech synthesis into your application. You simply send the text you want converted into speech to the Amazon Polly API, and Amazon Polly immediately returns the audio stream to your application so your application can begin streaming it directly or store it in a standard audio file format, such as MP3.

Amazon Polly includes dozens of lifelike voices and support for a variety of languages, so you can select the ideal voice and distribute your speech-enabled applications in many countries. In addition to Standard and Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices, Amazon Polly now offers Long-Form and Generative voices that improve speech quality for more natural and human-like voices.

Danielle, Gregory, Ruth, Patryk, Alva, and Raúl are voices available in a long-form variant.

Ruth, Matthew, Amy, Joanna, Danielle, Stephen, Olivia, Ayanda, Lucia, Lupe, Léa, Mía, and Vicki are available in a generative variant

Amazon Polly makes it easy to request an additional stream of metadata that provides information about when particular sentences, words and sounds are being pronounced. Using this metadata stream alongside the synthesized speech audio stream, you can now build your applications with an enhanced visual experience, such as speech-synchronized facial animation or karaoke-style word highlighting.

Please visit the documentation to learn more about how to use Speech Marks. 

With Amazon Polly, you can stream all kinds of information through your application to users in near real time. You can also choose from various sampling rates to optimize bandwidth and audio quality for your application. Amazon Polly supports MP3, Vorbis, and raw PCM audio stream formats.

Amazon Polly supports Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), a W3C standard, XML-based markup language for speech synthesis applications, and supports common SSML tags for phrasing, emphasis, and intonation. Custom Amazon SSML tags provide unique options, such as the ability to make certain voices speak in a Newscaster speaking style. This flexibility helps you create lifelike speech that will attract and hold the attention of your audience.

To learn more, visit the Amazon Polly documentation on SSML tags.

Amazon Polly can be used to synthesize speech as if it is were spoken by a TV or Radio newscaster. This can be a great way to read news articles or deliver flash briefing updates. The Newscaster style is currently available for the US English (en-US) Matthew and Joanna voices, British English (en-GB) Amy and US Spanish (es-US) Lupe voice using Neural text-to-speech. Listen to an audio sample in US English, British English or US Spanish.

Amazon Polly enables you to automatically adjust the speech rate based on a maximum allotted amount of time you define with a feature called time-driven prosody. This is beneficial for many use cases, especially when it comes to localization.

For example, suppose you have US English speech embedded in your training video and want to localize this video into German. Let’s say you translate the text using Amazon Translate and voice it with Polly. It is essential that the localized German speech streams in corresponding frames of the video, so the German speech cannot be longer than the US English speech. You can use this feature to more easily facilitate the dubbing process.

Amazon Polly supports all the programming languages included in the AWS SDK (Java, Node.js, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, and C++) and AWS Mobile SDK (iOS/Android). Polly also supports an HTTP API so you can implement your own access layer.

Amazon Polly can be accessed via the Polly API (and various language-specific SDKs), AWS Management Console, and the AWS command-line interface (CLI). You have full control over all the capabilities of Amazon Polly, whether you use the service through the console, the API, or the CLI.

With Amazon Polly’s custom lexicons, or vocabularies, you can modify the pronunciation of particular words, such as company names, acronyms, foreign words and neologisms (e.g., “ROTFL”, “C’est la vie” when spoken in a non-French voice). To customize these pronunciations, you upload an XML file with lexical entries. For example, you can customize the pronunciation of Nguyen by providing a phoneme using this XML:

Brand Voice is a custom engagement where you work with the Amazon Polly team to build an Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voice for the exclusive use of your organization. Brand Voice allows you to differentiate your products and applications with a unique vocal identity in a wide variety of use cases, including Amazon Connect and Alexa Skills integrations. We work with you throughout the entire process to identify the persona, identify an actor or actress and record their speech, and ultimately build and train a model to produce the voice. The voice is then made available to your AWS account ID(s).

Listen to National Australia Bank Brand Voice »

Listen to Bank of New Zealand Brand Voice »

If you are interested in building a Brand Voice using Polly, please reach out to your AWS Account Manager or contact us for more information.

Amazon Polly is natively integrated with Amazon Connect, AWS’ cloud-based contact center solution that you use to set up and manage a customer contact center and provide reliable customer engagement at any scale. To learn more about adding text to speech prompts to your conversational interactive voice response system, please see how to use Polly voices within Amazon Connect.

Genesys Cloud CX is a cloud contact center solution that unifies customers and agent experiences across multiple channels such as phone, text and chat. You can deploy your voice bots using any of the existing Polly voices. Please refer to Genesys Cloud documentation for more information.

The Amazon Chime SDK is a set of real-time communications components that developers can use to quickly add audio calling, video calling, and screen sharing capabilities to their own web, mobile or telephony applications. The Amazon Chime SDK supports native integration with Amazon Polly, making it easy for builders to create applications that turn text and numerical data into lifelike speech and automatically play the output to a phone caller.

Amazon Polly is used by several AWS CCI partners, so you can seamlessly create self-service customer service virtual agents, informational bots or application bots. Amazon Polly partners include Genesys, Vonage, and Accenture. To learn more about partners, visit AWS CCI and AWS CCI Partners page.